Hearthstone Cards and Ranked Mode Tweaked

Blizzard officially released Hearthstone today, and made a number of significant changes to the game ahead of the announcement, including a couple of card tweaks, a change to Ranked Mode, a heap of bug fixes and more.

In terms of cards, Tinkmaster Overspark has seen a stat boost from 2/2 to 3/3, but a fundamental change to his battlecry. The card text now reads - "Battlecry: Transform another random minion into a 5/5 Devilsaur or a 1/1 Squirrel." Players can now no longer target a minion with his battlecry, in other words.

Blizzard explained the change thusly: "Tinkmaster Overspark is a neutral card that silences and often shrinks big creatures. This reduces the amount of big, fun creatures in the environment. We think this change will increase the amount fun creatures in the environment, and bring him more in-line with his cost and overall power. Tinkmaster should still show up in certain types of decks, but will no longer be appearing in every high level deck."

Nat Pagle, meanwhile, now has a 50 percent chance of drawing a card at the start of your turn rather than the end. Again, this change has been made to reduce the power of the card.

Blizzard's explanation: "Nat had too much draw power for a card that is fairly hard to counter so early in the game, making it almost an auto-include for many decks. This change reduces the power of the card and gives players more time to counter the card before it starts."

Now that the game is officially out of beta, Blizzard has also re-iterated its stance on card changes in future, saying "We will only make changes to cards if they are absolutely necessary."

The other interesting change, which stands to benefit everyone, concerns Ranked Play. Every month up until this point, all players have had their levels reset to zero, resulting in incredibly experienced players dominating newcomers following every reset.

Now though, Legend, Innkeeper (Rank 1), or Black Knight (Rank 2) players will be reset to Questing Adventurer (Rank 16), rather than Angry Chicken (Rank 25). This means newcomers and the less experienced will be kept within their own pool to stop them getting destroyed, while those that have spent the previous month working to hit the top of the ladder won't have to start again from scratch.

Blizzard has also added a reconnect feature. "If you’re disconnected from a game, the reconnect feature will give you 60 seconds to re-log into Hearthstone to keep the action going. In order to maintain the fast pace of the game for both you and your opponent, if one of you happens to disconnect mid-match, the game will continue as if either of you were still playing. Try not to be gone too long, or that turn timer may be sizzling down when you get back!"

In addition to this, players can now switch regions, although their collections, friends and progress are unique to each region and therefore won't transfer over.

A new card back will also debut as the next Ranked Play reward), while golden heroes have also been added to the game, and are unlocked after winning 500 games in Ranked Play with any given hero.

Finally, fans of the game will also be pleased to hear that Blizzard has made a wide array of bug fixes to eliminate minions randomly swapping positions, floating cards and other issues that have been commonplace in the beta.